Although the Labour Party polled a record number of votes in the general election of 1951, it was the Conservatives who were elected to office. Harold Macmillan became the new Minister of Housing and was determined to out-build his Labour predecessors. And out-build them he did! Three years later - in 1954 - no less than three hundred and fifty-four thousand new houses were constructed. Conservatism with a 'one nation' moustached human face had arrived. The old man said in typically matter of fact fashion that anyone who had read Macmillan's book The Middle Way book (published in 1938) could have seen it coming
No one had told Major Lansdowne about The Middle Way. Otherwise this sad-eyed military man might not have spent every Saturday morning for the next fifteen years trying to sell copies of the Daily Worker in Bath city centre. It would have been hard work just giving them away. Despite the verve and gusto of the paper's headlines -Rigor Mortis's Breakaway Union Defies Call For General Strike! -was a special favourite - the masses remained unmoved. Perhaps selling the paper outside the Government offices where ration books had been issued was a tactical mistake. It was Consumerism, not socialism, which chimed with the mood of the times. When a left libertarian agit-prop newsletter called Neither Moscow or Washington but Twiverton! folded after its second issue the President of the Bath Trades Council was quoted as saying "he was not really surprised." The agit-prop editor's bitter parting shot (he went on to make a successful career in advertising) was "The spirit of the age is against us."
The spirit of the age was also moving against the prefabs. People wanted to move to Middle Way and live in a smart brick-built houses with a garage. Fickle times were weighing prefab estates in the balance and finding them wanting.